About
My name is Benjamin S. Nelson. I’m a philosophy PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. I’m also an artist — though that’s a secret, so let’s keep it just between you and me.
This is my catharsis dump. The things that I write here are the things they won’t let me say in class. About: philosophy, sci-fi, politics, and other fun stuff.
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Hello, Ben. What a great blog! You look just like Wittgenstein, you know.
Thanks! The “serious philosophy” icon is a pic of Wittgenstein, though with an artificial moustache, because Wittgenstein is a bit too serious and therefore needs a little more pep and therefore moustachified.
I understood the moustache as an artistic gesture similar to Marcel Duchamps drawing one on Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Philosophical dada, so to speak. I’m still trying to get the sense of your blog, but maybe it has no sense. There’s a movie about the Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense. That’s sort of dada too.
By the way, since internet is the mother of all misunderstandings, when I said that I was trying to make sense of your blog, I didn’t mean to imply that your blog was nonsense in the pejorative meaning of the word. Rather, I meant that unlike, say, Butterflies and Wheels, your posture on the issues and your philosophical tendencies are hard to put into neat pre-established categories.
It’s all good, I’m all about the dada. In fact, I think I’ll decorate the place with some more dadadoodles.
Raphael’s The School of Athens needs to be up-dated in the light of contemporary scholarship.
Interesting idea, albeit random. Who would be the main characters? I’m thinking Spinoza and Wittgenstein in the middle, just to upset everybody.
It would have to be people who everyone recognizes. Everyone recognizes Spinoza and Wittgenstein, that’s true. I have no idea what Kant or Liebnitz look like, on the other hand, and my mental image of Hume and Mill are vague. How about Nietzsche? Everyone recognizes Nietzsche. Darwin? Marx? Who would be crazy enough to argue with Nietzsche? I don’t know.